merchant violations

After a reader noticed that Mastercard’s Merchant Violation report form for consumers only let you put in 100 characters even though it said you had 5,000, we wrote a post about it (in addition to using the form itself to report the error). Now Mastercard has informed us that they fixed it, and indeed it passes our test. Finally, “As a point of reference, consumer questions and issues can be raised on our Twitter page at @MasterCard, as well as the web forms,” the MasterCard rep pointed out via email. That’s right, there’s now at least two ways to talk to MasterCard using over 100 characters.

I guess Mastercard has gotten tired of hearing long-winded consumer complaints about stores breaking their merchant agreement with them. The form on their website where you’re supposed to make complaints says that you can use a max of 5,000 characters, but when you actually go to type something in, it won’t let you enter in more than 100. Perhaps they would rather consumers tweet their complaints?